The Trouble with Schooling: Why Do Schools Kill Curiosity?

Thinking deeply about the story of public schooling can land you in trouble. That’s why Zander Sherman’s first book, The Curiosity of School: Education and the Dark Side of the Enlightenment could well be the most stimulating Canadian contribution to the Great Education Debate in decades. It came from out of the blue — and has hit the world of public schooling with the impact of a Molotov cocktail.

The Curiosity of School is a searing indictment of every aspect of schooling, from kindergarten to university, offering penetrating insights and packing a powerful message. Since the days of the Ancients, Zander Sherman contends that education as learning stemmed from our natural curiosity and desire to know the world around us. Acquiring knowledge will never be out-of-fashion, Sherman argues, because it is the very essence of education, and “a good unto itself.” Today’s schools are driven by curriculum serving other purposes, mistaking rigour for vigour, killing curiosity, and robbing learning of its enjoyment. http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670066438,00.html

Sherman is the agent provocateur that public schooling in Canada has been sadly lacking since Andrew Nikiforuk’s “Fifth Column” disappeared in the mid-1990s from Friday edition of The Globe and Mail. Raised on the rural fringes of a town in Muskoka, north of Toronto, he was home-schooled and, as a by-product of that experience, developed a fierce spirit of intellectual independence.

Like many inventive minds, Zander Sherman found his Canadian high school terribly deadening and very conducive to radical thinking. Bored to death in Grade 12, so accelerated that he enjoyed many “free periods,” Sherman began to question archaic school policies which limited the freedom of students.

When his high school barred students from sitting on the floor, he began writing and distributing his own pamphlet, The Anarchist, catching the attention of his principal. The cover featured a cartoon showing “a sinister administration puppeteering students forever unable to sit down.” When the principal ordered him to give out the pamphlets across the street, he complied but “looking menacingly in the school’s direction.” The principal finally relented, and the PA announcement was greeted with a chorus of cheers.

Sherman’s The Curiosity of Schoolprovides a sweeping and contentious survey of the origins of public schooling. Like American education gadfly John Taylor Gatto, he traces the modern bureaucratic education state back to Prussia in the early 19th century. Under the Prussian model, the state established a curriculum focused on “social control” and imposed it on everyone. The success of the Prussians in molding a disciplined youth and supporting the industrial system inspired system founders like Egerton Ryerson of Canada West (Ontario) and Horace Mann of Massachusetts to import that model into their own countries.

Sherman contends that the bureaucratic education state remains well entrenched in public schooling. Even today, he finds plenty of evidence that schools exist primarily to achieve state-defined outcomes, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and other testing regimes. Behind it all, he sees an institutional commitment severely limiting students’ ability to find and pursue their own interests.

The science-technology-engineering-mathematics (STEM) -based curriculum is a particular bugaboo, because it demonstrates the system’s real priorities. It is, he claims, a government-driven curriculum that favours technology and science to the detriment of the arts and humanities, measures proficiency in these disciplines through standardized tests, and focuses university research in these disciplines. He is also critical of the corporatization of higher learning, reducing education to a ‘consumable product’ and promoting ‘required irrelevance.’

Sherman’s case goes a little wobbly when he turns from diagnosis in a search for prescription. The father of North American education progressivism, John Dewey, is panned for favouring “pragmatism” over intellectual pursuit, and A.S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill is dismissed as a 1960s pipe dream. Yet Sherman still turns to Finland, the exemplar of progressivism, when looking for a means of salvation. http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/Thinking+about+education/7071701/story.html

The popular fixation with Finland’s so-called “education miracle” is misplaced. Its national model of free education at all levels is attractive, but that country’s system is not without its imperfections, including the rigid streaming of high school students. Curriculum is more flexible, but teacher certification requires teachers to have Masters Degrees and they are more closely monitored, limiting their autonomy. For a system supposedly without standardized exams, Finland sure puts a heavy emphasis on winning the PISA international test sweepstakes.

Sherman raises all the right issues, but steps back from embracing an obvious option – public charter schools and smaller, human-scale alternative schools. That’s a little odd because he strongly favours precisely that type of schooling. If he feels that Wuthering Heights is far preferable to Harry Potter, that Latin and Greek teach mental discipline, and everyone can be a polymath, then it’s surprising that he doesn’t turn to the very schools that continue to uphold that educational legacy.

What’s really driving today’s public school systems? Why do public schools tend to kill curiosity in students? What explains the continuing fascination with the Finnish education model? What impact will Sherman’s The Curiosity of School have on education reform in Canada?

34 Responses

I am not sure how schools kill curiosity but they tend to blame the lack of interest on computer fixation and addiction to computer games.

I am not sure how the two matters are related.
Perhaps schools are just boring and computer delivered information/ games provide more interesting and pertinent information to our kids?

What I have noted in my own two sons’ experience with public schooling is the curriculum that they have to learn is massive.
The things that they now learn in high school were things I learned at university.
In other words there seems to be more text for them to consume and memorize (note I do not say learn or get turned on by).

In going over the biology 20 correspondence course that I decided my older son would work on this summer (we want him to have some background in all the sciences and we could not fit this course into the grade 12 program for the next school year) I noted the density of the material that he is required to parse and frankly found the entire bolus of information difficult to swallow myself (even with a background in science there was a large coagulation of information that seemed to plug every hole in my brain so I felt like screaming and running off to read poetry).

In other words, lots of complicated stuff is being taught to our kids in every subject now and I think the expectations are that kids will memorize and produce this knowledge like seals performing in shows in academic tests. Which is fine. I mean we all have to learn to go through the hoops of the society and become the sorts of successful shows that perform on every podium of government and in every public institution but what this also means is that our kids are somewhat lacking in time to really achieve curiosity.

I say achieve curiosity because you don’t simply become curious naturally (or at least I didn’t go this route but had to be bored senseless by many things before deciding to achieve curiosity).

You have to get through a pile of manure to grow the seeds of curiosity and sometimes it takes your whole life of going through minor curiosities to get to a major one. If you are lucky you will be like my dad, who was force fed success by my grandpa and became a physician and loved it so much that he works in his eighties to do what he loves doing. But as for me, I had many minor curious topics I liked but never got to the big bang curiosity subject until I hit writing.

I can’t blame our public schools for not being in the curiosity business. They are all working in one big monolayer system—as some lower down unit of a larger unit—the school system—which is again part of yet another larger unit which is the educational department of government which in turn is part of the major tumor of government and then the entire fits into the larger slot of the federal government and thus schools are under the wings of other entities that direct them for the most part. These higher end entities (in my opinion) don’t know what the hell they are doing for all their educational skills and training and so we have a morass of lost individuals playing educational pundits that I no longer believe in. I only now believe in a few dedicated teachers in the system with high standards —-who are fine folks and my own minor and distracted teaching ability.

Of course school boards are supposed to direct our school systems to ensure they develop curious, creative entities as well as obedient citizens willing to jump through hoops but this rarely happens in Edmonton, much less Alberta and obviously isn’t happening in other places in Canada and even the US because school trustees are bells that are rung by the superintendant and school district administration executive staff.
Even worse than this school boards are constrained in their roles by the fact that the provincial government controls the cash flow of the system so any sort of squawking by trustees might rile the powers that be and cut of the money to the districts. I am sure that trustees have to be the most diplomatic folks around stuck as they are between school district administration that are dinosaur era and rock-like in their transparency/accountability to the stakeholders of parents while also being positive with the provincial governments they deal with and any shortfalls in cash that are doled out by said provincial governments.
In short it is all a big mess.
And curiosity is at the bottom of the pile of rubbish.

What this means for parents is that we are especially powerless entities in our school systems and you can opt out and homeschool your kids but why do this? You can use the public education system to provide the skeleton of the curriculum, then you can get your kids to literate at home by working hard with them. If you are especially inclined to academic projects you can try them on different things such as Artstrek, drama classes, water polo classes, etc (but this means you need to budget for extra training ) and you can try to do correspondence courses with them which will help you as a parent become a littel more generous with reference to expectations for super performance on exams as well as get your child to understand intimately the level of understanding you expect for work done at school.

Since I want my sons to go beyond the silly no-zero policy of Edmonton Public Schools, I plan to look for bright intelligent teachers in the schools we mutually select —and get my sons to them. I will also try to do the hard work of teaching them myself. This isn’t as easy as I thought it would be because kids do not follow a parent’s directives as well as that of a stranger (teacher). But it is necessary.

What was I yapping about in this response?
Curiosity.
Can’t manufacture it in a potion in the magical thinking that is endemic in the school system in Canada or the wacky thinking in our educational departments. Parents have to get their kids to curious and one day the kid might simply be so turned on by something that he will do it for free, all the time, and be thrilled to bit by whatever crummy thing he produces (as I am with my poems).

Suggestion: It is silly to criticising schools for not doing something that they couldn’t possibly do given the prevailing state of things. The school system will always have to function as a supplier of people able to do what needs to be done outside school. That wider society still needs the vast majority of subjects to be happy ticking over as (primarily) consumers – not people who enquire, reflect, criticise, engage, participate and challenge. It is a society that is intellectually stultifying, despite the unprecedented range of niches in which unreflective but curious specialists can beaver away to their heart’s content. When we have a wider culture that thrives on curiosity, reflection, critique and an understanding of where it has come from and where it is going, it will be appropriate to bash the schools that are lagging behind. In the meantime, bashing schools in the way that Mr Sherman seems to be doing just lends support to the forces that will slowly destroy public schooling.

Torn has a point. Add to this the overcrowded curriculum in which more and more is piled on (with nothing taken away), not including the information overload from the thoughtless use of technology, who has time to slow down and “play” with ideas.
And let’s not raise the old canard about “they have to learn the basics first”.
Yes they have to learn the basics, but we need a clearer focus on what these are. Moreover, basics are often learned WHILE other important learning goals are being worked on. This works in music, art, drama, dance, and sports.

But for the “searing indictment” part, the Sherman book’s got my attention. As have the comments of the other respondents. In my reading of Nova Scotia’s Kids and Learning First multi-year plan I was struck by the seeming absence of any sense of joy or delight, first cousins of curiosity, in either its tone or its vision. It`s a joyless read and I was saddened by that. I`d like to think joy has a place in learning. But the report sustains a shoulder-to-the-wheel tone that makes even me, an involved parent, aspiring board member, and optimist, want to weep. To be clear, by “joy” and “delight” I don`t mean fun and play. I’m someone who thinks that there can be joy even in something as unlikely as the learning of self-discipline in acquiring knowledge.

But I see opportunity regardless of the report`s tone. It may be a joyless read but it`s not entirely without merit. That’s why I’m not a proponent of searing indictments. It feels like throwing out babies with bathwater. I have a fondness for babies and want to see them worked with as opposed to disposed of. There is merit in working with what we’ve got as a starting point and, building on the strengths, working toward improved goals and the education system overall. I`m offering to throw myself into it and, if successful, making a point of speaking about it in a way that communicates the concern, caring, and excitement for the possibilities that I genuinely feel. I may end up divested of my enthusiasm but it will have to be taken from me by force. I will not accept that all is lost or that there is no joy. There is good in the system and the potential for better and that`s the basis on which I`d like us all to proceed.

We all know where creativity went. The reform movement in education might well be called “the movement to drive creativity out of education” through testing, phonics, direct instruction teacher bashing and the like.

The hero to the Reform movement is Mr Gradgrind of Dicken’s hard times.

Keep in mind that there is no streaming in Finland until the end of compulsory education, They read better than we do, the first time they topped PISA nobody was more shocked than the Finns. Requiring masters degrees is an excellent idea if phased in. It stops the dumbing down of teachers to ‘technique’.

Much as I admire Finland in many ways there is one nation that tops the entire world in the % of students that achieve a post secondary education. Stand up and take a bow Canada.

If you care about the state of schooling, you will find Torn Halves insightful commentaries absolutely fascinating. It’s social criticism at its best, designed to shake you up and force you to question your previous assumptions.

One of Torn Halves best critiques of contemporary schooling trends takes dead aim at Dr. Sugata Mitra’s conception of “outdoctrination.” He’s ahead of the curve in speculating on the potential outcome of turning state education over to “outsource” providers.

Got me wondering: Could it be that teachers, once again, eventually turn to Plato’s Academy in some future education world? Outsourcing education to K-12 Inc, for example, might lead to laissez faire, progress at your own pace learning. If so, will tomorrow’s school children be any further ahead?

Torn Halves has risen to my discussion bait. He’s now taken to Facebook with a gentle rebuke of my post:

“Good teachers up and down the land are wrecking their personal lives trying to find ways to make their lessons more engaging for their students, to elicit some of that precious curiosity. My guess is that all too often they feel it is an uphill task. Their students (after a certain age, at least) are not flocking to them in the way that the athletes at the gymnasium were said to drop their games when Socrates appeared so that they could find out more about Truth, Beauty and the Good.

Curiosity is not being killed by schools because: 1) People are not by nature so very curious – curiosity needs to be cultivated; 2) The world outside school woefully fails to cultivate curiosity, among a host of other intellectual virtues.

If curiosity matters and you want to bash something, there is lots that need bashing before schools.” (Torn Halves, Facebook, August 20, 2012)

Comment:

Zander Sherman is not the first social critic to contend that schools have a way of wringing curiosity out of students. Neil Postman made the same argument in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, once considered required reading in North American faculties of education. The same message comes through in Ted Sizer’s modern classic Horace’s Compromise. His unsung hero, English teacher Horace Smith, makes the same observation about the state of the American high school.

I haven’t yet read Postman’s “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” but I have read and enjoyed “Entertaining Ourselves to Death”. The main thread there is that the big obstacle to the realisation of our 18th century dreams comes from outside school, and what is to be most feared in education is the thoughtless rush to keep school in step with the go-go dancing world beyond its austere walls. That is my argument exactly. The concern about the fate of curiosity is presumably a concern about our collective intellectual development. Compared to the senseless intellectual desertification going on in society (call it dumbing down), public schools, for all their faults, stand out as oases of sanity.

Since you seem to be coming back at me, I feel I have to defend uncurious schools at greater length. I have done so here:

I do so object to Torn’s statement – “Curiosity is not being killed by schools because: 1) People are not by nature so very curious – curiosity needs to be cultivated; 2) The world outside school woefully fails to cultivate curiosity, among a host of other intellectual virtues.”

But I can understand why he would think curiosity is not part of the experiences of being human, and definitely not at all natural. His disdain for technology shows through when discussing Khan Academy on his Facebook page, and seeing the world as simply being anti-teacher, shows clearly where he stands. In his essay, entitled “.Sugata Mitra’s Outdoctrination – a Critique”. he writes, “Part of the problem with outdoctrination is that the end result, as far as the mentality of the students is concerned, is likely to be a sort of soft semi-nihilism – a quiet confusion about values (assuming the students don’t come across some sect or other online and decide that it has grasped the Absolute Truth, signing up for a maximally invasive course in scientology, for instance).

The outcome is likely to bear a striking resemblance to that of the maximally invasive multicultural education we have had in Europe for a few decades now. Multiculturalism meant tolerance, and that was cultivated by doing a few lessons about one dogma, then a few more about another, then another, and so on until it became obvious to the students that there were numerous names for the Supreme Being, with no way of deciding which was right and which was wrong. Tolerance might be gained, but at the expense of a firm belief in anything in particular – a quiet, liberal semi-nihilism.”http://islifeabsurd.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/sugata-mitra-outdoctrination-critique/

The question that is begging to be posed, is the other side of the coin, indoctrination. In Wikipedia, “.Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology (see doctrine).[1] It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned.[2] As such the term may be used pejoratively, often in the context of education, political opinions, theology or religious dogma. The term is closely linked to socialization; in common discourse, indoctrination is often associated with negative connotations, while socialization refers to cultural or educational learning.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoctrination

If indoctrination and outdoctrination are one and the same, and that is producing polar opposites of firm beliefs versus soft beliefs, than I can see why Torn believes that people are not by nature so very curious. And he could not be so wrong.about it, because it is not going to be found in the philosophers books of old and new.

Curiosity is a trait (although it is still being disputed by the scientists), but the scientists all agree it is part of being human, and animals also processed the ability to be curious. In Wikipedia, “Although many living beings have an innate capability of curiosity, it should not be categorized as an instinct because it is not a fixed action pattern; rather it is an innate basic emotion because while curiosity can be expressed in many ways, the expression of an instinct is typically more fixed and less flexible. Curiosity is common to human beings at all ages from infancy[1] through adulthood,[2] and is easy to observe in many other animal species. These include apes, cats, rodents,[3] fish, reptiles, and insects; as well as many others.[citation needed]” , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity

On the Wired Science blog – “The elegance of this system is that it bootstraps a seemingly unique human talent to an ancient mental process. Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food. I’ll let the scientists have the last word:

Understanding the neural basis of curiosity has important substantive implications. Note that while information-seeking is generally evolutionarily adaptive, modern technologies magnify the amount of information available, and hence the potential effects of curiosity. Understanding curiosity is also important for selecting and motivating knowledge workers who gather information (such as scientists, detectives, and journalists). The production of engaging news, advertising and entertainment is also, to some extent, an attempt to create curiosity. The fact that curiosity increases with uncertainty (up to a point), suggests that a small amount of knowledge can pique curiosity and prime the hunger for knowledge, much as an olfactory or visual stimulus can prime a hunger for food, which might suggest ways for educators to ignite the wick in the candle of learning.”http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/the-itch-of-curiosity/

Khan Academy, allows the curiosity doors to open, when students learned to mastery of the material. As suggested and in some science research, curiosity emerges, when the person has just enough knowledge to become curious. I agree with it, I seen it with my own children, It is when they start asking the big questions that go far beyond the material, and as I have observed in the public education system, the curiosity is squelched by responses of, ‘You don’t need to learned that until next year’ or ‘There is no need to learn about it, because it is not in the curriculum or other variations like the former two.

Schools, like the social institution called the public education system, have always killed the natural curiosity of children, by the very pedagogical and education practices that claims to ignite curiosity of children. It happens when children have not been taught to mastery, and in some cases not taught, that turns off their curiosity. The science research is slowing proving curiosity is very much a part of being a human experience that we all share, The problem with the education system, they still insist to philosophize based on dogma, resulting in sweeping generalizations such as Torn, stating, ” “Curiosity is not being killed by schools because: 1) People are not by nature so very curious – curiosity needs to be cultivated; 2) The world outside school woefully fails to cultivate curiosity, among a host of other intellectual virtues.”

But there is other educators that will proclaimed, as Daniel Greenberg has done so elegantly, ” I leave you with the thought that Aristotle had it right: human curiosity triumphs first, last, and always. Nothing can stop it. We’re lucky to be living in an era when its free exercise benefits both the individual and society as never before.”http://www.sudval.com/essays/042007.shtml

Nancy, please let me highlight the overriding intention of my argument, which is to defend public schools. I don’t know what your position is regarding public schools. I have a vision of a slightly better society in which public schools serving local neighbourhoods staffed by teachers who have been trained in schools of education at universities that are relatively free from both party and corporate influence are very, very important. If people like Sherman’s parents want to home school their kids, okay. There should be the freedom for that kind of deviation from the norm. No problem. What I see, though, is public schooling coming under attack from lots of different angles at the moment (Sherman, Robinson – and although Robinson got his knighthood for services to education, his arguments are being promoted by anti-schoolers – Mitra and lots of the digital pseudo-revolutionaries).

In a different context I would want to concentrate on how public schooling could be improved, but when I see all of the forces currently beseiging it, the immediate priority I feel is to defend it.

Separate point: You say below that it is a cop-out to cast blame elsewhere, but you don’t demonstrate why I am wrong in asserting that what is really holding us back intellectually is the dumbing down of society outside school (but dumbing down is not the best term because part of the problem is with the unreflective but highly trained specialists, like the economists, for instance, who are happy to see society corresponding to mathematical models).

Let me give an example from my own experience. I have tried to do lessons in poetry with teenagers. The BIG challenge there was to make poetry seem important. The children had lots of curiosity, but, on the whole, were not particularly curious about poetry. The teacher has to work very hard to create the impression that poetry matters, and only if she succeeds, will some of that student curiosity be harnessed to the agreed educational ends (assuming agreement is possible). She has to work so hard because the culture beyond school decrees that poetry is dead unless it can be rapped with a drum beat in the background.

Another example: I made the observation in my post that the premature sexualisation of the young was more of a threat to intellectual curiosity (I take your point about the vagueness of that term, but I think you can appreciate that I am talking about the sort of curiosity relevant to an old fashioned formal education, not a curiosity about personal matters, etc) than the constraints of the classroom. Am I wrong about this and about other cultural influences that have been carefully orchestrated outside school?

The point at the end of my article was to question the undue emphasis being given to curiosity. Is the point about Laputa not a valid one? And in connection with poetry, what are we to do? Are we to say: The students come to school curious about 50 Cent and Snoop Dog, so let’s drop the Dead White Poets and teach hip hop? Is the curriculum to be driven by curiosities that have been created by the culture industry?

To return to my main point: My fear is that education will be engulfed completely by the economy (and the digital pseudo-revolutionaries are helping this immensely). What stops me despairing completely is the perception that there can still be pockets of resistance to the tyranny of the bottom line. Public schools can be such places.

I stand on the other side, that is often forgotten and dismissed by all the stakeholders within the education system. The side that if is often used as political footballs by the stakeholders within the education system. The parents and ultimately their children’s education.

To cast blame on the outside forces of corporatism, the economists, the politicians, the education gurus commanding big dollars for speaking engagements, and outside forces beyond the school walls, is being myopic at the very least. One should be asking the question who invited the outside forces into the public education system in the first place?

It wasn’t parents, Nor the communities. Nor the classroom teachers. It was the heads of the education stakeholders – the education faculties, the education ministries, the school boards, the school trustees, the teachers’ unions and last but very important the principals of the individual schools. It was done in the name of profit by the outside forces, but the education stakeholders invited the outside forces in for nefarious reasons of obtainment of power and political influence casting their nets beyond the education system into controlling the bottom players, the individual teachers, the parents, the students and by extension the communities.

Control what? The education of children, and by extension to control and limit the political and social capital of parents and the communities. The individual classroom teachers, are in a different place and to which they have already been conditioned by the education faculties to cast blame on the outside forces that includes parents, the communities, the SEC variables, and by extension, the individual teachers no longer look within the public education system using their own political and social capital. How can they, when they are hogtied to every way but loose, and are not permitted to go off the script created and designed by the head forces of the education stakeholders to control, and where the outside forces of corporatism, and others are only too happy to provide the content, the processes, and systems to delivered education for a profit.

Torn writes – “Is the point about Laputa not a valid one? And in connection with poetry, what are we to do? Are we to say: The students come to school curious about 50 Cent and Snoop Dog, so let’s drop the Dead White Poets and teach hip hop? Is the curriculum to be driven by curiosities that have been created by the culture industry?”

Torn, the curriculum is being driven to control the curriculum content and in so doing control the education of children, by reinforcing over and over,the public education system has only the best interests of society and their education, and those that work within the education system are the only ones in society to deliver the education. The outside forces such as corporatism are only to glad to provide the content according the inside agendas of the stakeholders within the public education system, and to which the public education systems are funded by the government tax monies. By extension, the political forces, the sitting governments no matter what stripe now have control over the over arching goals of education. The ability to reinforce messages that governments and their political dogmatism have only the best interests of its citizens, and their education. The education stakeholders within the social institute are only to happy to toed the line on the overarching political goals regarding what constitutes an education, in exchange for power and influence to control the bottom feeders – the students, parents, and the communities.

Resulting in the elimination of dead white poets, spelling lessons, grammar, and a host of other education practices that are and always have been in the best interests of all students in reaching their full potential. A rather famous dead white poet, that has been removed from the standard curriculum, and a poem I heard for the first time in grade 4 in the 1960s, is now considered too radical for the elementary students to hear and explore. A poem, that just a year ago I once again used to show my youngest what is imagery. I took great pride, when she stated capturing the essence – the underlying message – that governments and their agencies have never have had the best interests of their citizens. As for the imagery, she now understood what is imagery, but unfortunately the poems in today’s curriculum one would be hard pressed to find poems that criticizes and shows the political and economic powers in an unflattering light, that questions their authority, their expertise, their actions and behaviours.

As a parent, all what I wanted was my children to become good readers, writers and have good numeracy skills, to be able to dive into the books of knowledge of old and new, to understand the world as it stands today in the light of the past, the present and the possible futures that have yet to be realized. It is the content of the knowledge of the past and present that has been hijacked by the agendas of the political and economic forces outside of the education system, but more importantly the agendas within the education system, and its structure are designed for the expressed purpose of providing a basic education that serves the best interests within but always at the expense of the children’s education, never reaching their full academic potential, and their futures.

Curiosity has become another causality and where the processes of curiosity are controlled. Heavens forbid, if children actually became curious and realized that they are being fed on a steady diet of questionable education practices, that ultimately controls their futures by shutting their doors of future choices in adulthood, by not providing the skills and abilities needed for one and all students to navigate in the adult world.

Torn writes, “Greenberg that once the intellectual thirst is acquired it is damn hard to kill it. If someone called me up and offered me a job as a killer of curiosity, I wouldn’t know where to start. How do you kill curiosity? I don’t know. What I do know is that we as a society are failing miserably in encouraging a more intelligent approach to our collective and individual lives, and to that extent we are failing to cultivate curiosity – a curiosity about the big ideas, the intellectual traditions we find ourselves in and our collective future (as opposed to a curiosity about soccer scores, celebrity gossip and the next episode of our favourite soap opera).”

As a parent, and living the nightmare of an education system for the pass 11 years, according to the experts within the education school board, my youngest child had deficits in curiosity. and other academic deficiencies that would keep her as a D student, and at the very best a C student. It was done in the name of denying access to the education services to remediate the core problems in basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. But when I objected, by questioning their authority and expertise starting when my youngest child was in grade 1, on what I considered pretty lame reasons and thoughts crossing my mind of ‘do they think that I am that stupid to fall for their reasons’, and to gladly accept the responsibilities and at my own expense, to educate my child on all things that the education system has abdicated and withdraw. To where the basic foundation in the 3 Rs, are no longer required according to the experts , for students to have a solid foundation to understand and make sense of their world. When I did complain loud and clear, I was told point blank, that it is the parents’ duties to ensure that their children have a firm foundation in the 3 Rs.

In the world of the 21st century public education system model. my dyslexic child was in no need of any education services of the remediation kind in the 3 Rs, since she was passing all core subjects. If I objected to this line of thinking, by presenting the argument that with the remediation based on the research in the dyslexic, learning and cognitive fields, and the best practices, techniques and programs to remediate the core learning problems in reading, writing and numeracy to where it is no longer interfering in learning: the responses of the public education system are breathtaking in terms of the use of techniques to prevent and convince parents that the public education system, funded by government tax dollars, are the the best ones to decide what, where and by whom what educational content material and practices that are the best for students.

The public education system has the legal authority to do so, compliments of the legislation acts, charging the public education system to delivered the education, as they see fit within the budgets and the overall arching goals of providing a basic education for virtually a captive market that has no other options and alternatives than the public education system. A system that is designed to control the actions and behaviours of the classroom teachers, the students, the parents and by extension the communities. It results in parents, the students and the communities often acting and behaving against the best interests of their children and the communities by being force to adapt to the many agendas and goals within the public education system. to retain their political and social capital by removing the political and social capital from the individual teachers, students, parents and the communities.

The classroom teachers, the individual teachers are caught between the many agendas and interests within the education stakeholders of the education system, that they can no longer teach effectively to their best abilities and knowledge for the best interests of their students. Rather difficult to arouse the curiosity of students, engaging them in deep learning when the students do not have a firm foundation of skills and abilities to stand on, to initiate the curiosity and engagement traits that all humans process, the kind of curiosity that Torn has described as intellectual curiosity. As Torn writes, and justly so – ” Some of the talk about curiosity seems to run together different kinds of curiosity. On the one hand there is the intellectual curiosity that ultimately matters in a modern education. On the other hand, there is the sort of curiosity present in the very young child that must make sense of an unfamiliar world. Doubtless children are born with lots of the latter, but not the former. Intellectual curiosity is something that needs to be cultivated. If it were otherwise, civilisation wouldn’t have been progressing so slowly and so fitfully for the past 5,000 years.”

The education system model based on the 19th century industrialized era, has met its match with the advancements in the science of learning, the technology that for the first time, have open up the gates of knowledge for one and all that has given the outsiders a window looking into the deep recesses and corners of a public education system model, that is designed to provide only a basic education under the law, and the instrument to delivered the education services to the students. and their communities. But what is masked and hidden from the public, the quality of education does not matter, nor the individual outcomes of students.in their academic achievement levels, and more importantly reaching the full potential of all students. Why? The education system models, are not charge legally to provide quality education services that ensures all students will reach their potential that enables the students to have the skills and abilities needed in the adult world.

As it stands now, the public education system of 2012, and its structure are the real culprits in producing the identical dismal stats of the LD students where there has been no change in achievement since the 1960s. The 21st century, the technology brought the advantage of large data streams at the researchers’ disposal. exposing the numbers – the outcomes – of students. Today, as in the 1960s, approximately 94 percent of the LD student population are at the bottom of the pile in terms of academic achievement, and as for the remaining 6 percent of the LD students, the credit goes to the parents using whatever options that they have at their disposal, and as well as the individual teachers that are brave enough to go against the procedures, practices and processes of an education system that prevents LD students from ever reaching their academic potential. The vast majority of LD students never do learn the pleasures of intellectual curiosity, because their core cognitive weaknesses have never been remediated to where the cognitive weaknesses poses no problems in learning in the classroom. However, it is not only the students with some type of disability that impacts learning, and the teacher’s ability to teach effectively engaging and arousing the curiosity of students, but the data streams are showing the outcomes of approximately 60 to 75 percent of all students never reaching their full potential and they become the causalities of self-serving agendas and interests inside and outside of the education system, and it is the individual classroom teachers who are picking up the pieces and fall-out of education policies that do not serve the best interests of students nor the front-line educators.

Curiosity, engagement, and all of the other soft skills such as socialization skills, are the first things to disappeared in an education system that has stripped the power and autonomy from the teachers, the students, the parents and the communities.

I leave with a post on the SQE facebook page – ” Hello, I am not sure if you have covered this. I have a concern for students, as I had for myself when I was younger. When I was nine I felt that there was not the care to ensure options were made available for me to navigate my path through education, to recognize what school can provide, and know how it is structured. I equate this to being placed in our city’s underground Path system in Toronto where there is no adequate signage and the maps do not face the same direction.

Doesn’t that say it all – there is no road map or signs or the guidance that ensures students and the parents do not get lost in the sea of self-serving agendas and interests that are not in the best interests of the children nor the public’s tax purse. I could have used a bright neon sign when my child was in grade one, directly me to the sources and the research on the information of learning to read – the science of reading – that is woefully lacking with the current education system. Ditto for teachers in the classrooms, including the Torns’ of the world who has an appreciation of the classics in literature that actually do a wonderful job in teaching the ways of a world, compared to the politically correct sanitized literature found in schools, So don’t despair Torn, there is pockets of resistance to the tyranny within and outside of the public education system. The first step is to acknowledge and give it a voice that is louder than the voices of the self-serving agendas and interests within and outside of the public education system.

Back from the shops, and I want to pick up your final quote: “human curiosity triumphs first, last, and always. Nothing can stop it.” I absolutely agree. People seem to be talking very glibly about killing curiosity, as if: 1) The newborn have an unquenchable thirst to question and investigate and explore and learn (as opposed to doing things like kicking spherical objects, forming groups and fighting), and 2) schools are killing this. In reply, I think, firstly, the thirst is as much acquired as it is innate, and secondly, I agree with Greenberg that once the intellectual thirst is acquired it is damn hard to kill it. If someone called me up and offered me a job as a killer of curiosity, I wouldn’t know where to start. How do you kill curiosity? I don’t know. What I do know is that we as a society are failing miserably in encouraging a more intelligent approach to our collective and individual lives, and to that extent we are failing to cultivate curiosity – a curiosity about the big ideas, the intellectual traditions we find ourselves in and our collective future (as opposed to a curiosity about soccer scores, celebrity gossip and the next episode of our favourite soap opera).

One thing I notice from helping my wife with her business. People from around the world increasingly flock to Canada for education at all levels because the word is out. It is the world’s highest level English language education.

People are catching on. Too bad our overall system is not appreciated enough here in Canada.

Yeah Doug, people with fat wallets to pay their own way, and government policies opening the gates of immigration for student visas. Not only Canada but as well as in United States. The reason for Canada being a bit higher for foreign students, is the lower tuition compared to the U.S., as well as living costs.

Contemporary society may not necessarily encourage human curiosity, but schools don’t help either. State schooling, since the introduction of the Prussian model, has served other purposes. That’s the whole point of Zander Sherman’s The Curiosity of School.

Mark my words — this is a book that will have us questioning many of our prior assumptions about the world of education. Sherman has nailed John Dewey by identifying the long-term damage he inflicted on intellectual pursuit. Think Ivan Illich and John Taylor Gatto for the rising generation.

” Inevitably, they have to prepare students for the world that they will in fact face, and if that is an intellectually stultifying world, the effects will be felt with equal inevitability inside school.”

Torn, that is a cop-out – a nice exit stage left of avoiding by not acknowledging the role of the public education institute, its models and structures that plays havoc with curiosity. To cast blame elsewhere, and protect the status-quo of the intellectuals and expertise within the public education system.

Is it better to portray the school as being powerless and helpless to (as you put it) the intellectually stultifying world? Cast blame, will only reinforce the message that schooling drives out curiosity and justifies Sherman’s theme, “For him, the schools of today do not provide “education,” because their curriculum reflects purposes extrinsic to the student, repressing inquisitiveness and robbing learning of enjoyment.”http://www.canada.com/entertainment/books/Thinking+about+education/7071701/story.html

In the Globe and Mail interview – Sherman states – “Which subjects do foster the best education proper?

I would say there is no universal definition of “education proper.” Think of food: We all know healthy food when we see it, and when we pass McDonald’s, we all know that’s not it.

Having said that, I’m currently working on an article about the importance of Latin and Greek. In the schools of yesteryear, knowledge of the classical languages was part of a pedagogy known as “formal discipline.” The idea was that the human brain is a muscle; learning Latin and Greek gave the brain a workout, students’ minds were toughened, sculpted.

Torn, Sherman is not that far off from your position when it comes to curiosity because both are based on your own childhood experiences and schooling. The difference is how curiosity is defined.

From what I can gathered from the newspaper articles,Sherman keeps it simple, the curiosity is not encouraged inside the formal public education system, unlike homeschooling. Torn’s explanation, “Some of the talk about curiosity seems to run together different kinds of curiosity. On the one hand there is the intellectual curiosity that ultimately matters in a modern education. On the other hand, there is the sort of curiosity present in the very young child that must make sense of an unfamiliar world. Doubtless children are born with lots of the latter, but not the former. Intellectual curiosity is something that needs to be cultivated. If it were otherwise, civilisation wouldn’t have been progressing so slowly and so fitfully for the past 5,000 years.”http://tornhalves.blogspot.it/2012/08/do-schools-kill-curiosity.html

My search for a definition outside of the science field, resulted in many definitions, casting blame, and circular arguments. There is no universal definition, but it is curious that the public education system have undertaken by keeping curiosity in a silo, with the baby silos parked next to the Mother silo, of the different kinds of curiosity.

Torn, states that intellectual curiosity is of the utmost importance and must be cultivated. I have a lot of difficulty with Torn’s definition, because it discards the natural and innate curiosity of students, in favour of intellectual curiosity. What is intellectual curiosity? I cannot find the answer, except that as I found multiple definitions of curiosity,and the curious connection of anti-intellectualism to intellectual curiosity. I moved on to the dyslexic files, where the successful dyslexics – the Nobel prize winners, credits their curiosity among other traits despite their weaknesses in language, reading difficulties, and schools that still insist on education practices that prevents the majority of dyslexics to reached their potential. I than moved to what the educators had to say about curiosity. I thought for sure, I would find what I was looking for, but to no avail.

What I did find, a few teacher blogs talking about intellectual curiosity and how to developed it. “Teachable Moments is a glimpse into the CPS classroom experience. Each month, we collect snapshots from around the city that provide insight into the quality of curriculum and the talent of the teaching staff found in all our schools.

On Psychology Today, “Firstly, curiosity must be stimulated and encouraged throughout education. Children are naturally curious (ever heard the endless ‘why’ questions?) but few people have insatiable curiosity that cannot be dulled and blunted by dogmatism. Educational settings that don’t give space to free exploration and ‘why’ questions, but solely dictate facts, easily suffocate a child’s the spirit of wonder. Because curiosity is not only a trait but also a state, it is particularly important for schools and teachers to exploit their plentiful opportunities to induce and inspire curiosity in pupils and students. For one, curious students will perform better and for the other, students, who are intellectually stimulated, will more satisfied with their educational experience.”http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201110/why-curiosity-doesn-t-kill-the-cat

Tony Wagner, earned an M.A.T. and an Ed.D. at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. In his book called, The Global Achievement Gap, he considers curiosity as a important element in 21st century education. “Teaching all students to think and to be curious is much more than a technical problem for which educators, alone, are accountable. And more professional development for teachers and better textbooks and tests are all necessary, but insufficient, as solutions. The problem goes much deeper—to the very way we conceive of the purpose and experience of schooling and what we expect our high school graduates to know and to be able to do. As adults, we had a set of experiences in school that define for us what learning is supposed to look like, and in most cases, our past experience still shapes how we think about school. And these preconceptions often prevent us from clearly understanding how very different the experience of schooling must be for our children. In the coming pages, I will invite you to question your assumptions about what all students should know-what it means to be an educated adult in the 21st century—as well as how we should assess this knowledge.”http://www.tonywagner.com/resources/the-global-achievement-gap

At the top of the introduction, a quote from Albert Einstein.

“INTRODUCTION
“The formulation of the problem is often more important than the solution”
—Einstein”

It certainly appears that our education institutes are willing to cast blame, provide solutions without spending time on the formulation of the problem, the questions, the hypotheses, and defining the elements of curiosity. Solutions flows from the well designed parameters of the problem formulation. No wonder, that everybody has their opinion based on their own experiences of schooling and set of solutions, when the problem has been formulated and designed to replicated the 19th century industrialized model of education and its solutions that is doing serious damage to the education of youth in the 21st century.

Take a look at PISA Nancy, they do. They see the highest English speaking nation on the planet and since they don’t really want to go to school in Korean or Finnish we become de facto #1. Why would they want #17 the USA?

They notice U of T is #16 in the world rankings so that is what they want. The others above it are too exclusive and too expensive.

I am talking about an education system that seems more concern about having students requiring certification, that is needed to obtained a job. Students are driven to get the certification because without it no employer would look at them. Likewise for teachers, it is the certification that gets them the interviews for teaching jobs, and having only certified teachers, as the one side has stated, further erodes the standards of teaching to one standard, and more importantly, hinders curiosity of teachers.

Both sides have valid points and in the end, both sides agree that curiosity is in danger of disappearing. Where they do not agree on what is curiosity, and how it fits in with the education of students. A lot of confusion, especially when there is no universal definition for curiosity and its twin creativity.

“I have been thoroughly impressed by the social, emotional and intellectual development of the children who are learning at home. So much so, that my husband will be leaving his job in two years to home school our children during their grade 8 and 9 years.

Parents who elect to homeschool, whether religious or dealing with a severely challenging child or parenting a gifted child or fairly leftist in philosophy, are all home-schooling to protect their children from the perceived/real threats in the public school system. Boredom, bullying, sex, drugs, idiocy, lousy teachers, hyperactive classroom behaviour, shallow curriculum… I have heard all of these reasons for having a parent stay home and set up a school room. I confess, I’m a teacher and I find myself saying, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep… it’s all true.

Homeschooling can fail.

When parents are not plugged in and students are left to sort of muddle through, say, online courses all by themselves, motivation dwindles, loneliness sets in and students start to learn how to level up in a video game instead.” (Excerpted from The Globe and Mail)

To be fair, the Globe and Mail piece has other parts, including a concern by Stephen Hurley that if we all did home schooling there might be a cost to the cohesion of our diverse, pluralistic, multicultural, multilingual and multifaith-based society.
I share that concern and there is some evidence to support Stephen’s view. See Deborah Tannen’s work on this (The Argument Culture) in the mid 1990s. Since then the internet and far too much of social networking often degenerates into a form of “virtual hate speech” according to Richard Sennett’s latest book on how society has come to be (Cooperation).

Dan Willingham’s latest book also speaks to the persistence of our “meta narratives” which are very hard to change, regardless of evidence. The mission of public education is to promote civic competence. Like democracy, it is messy and imperfect and surely needs to be improved. Yet like democracy it is better than the alternatives.

I really regretting my cowardliness, in not to homeschool in 2002. At the time, I thought it was not in my best interests or my family, to be the first one to homeschool – a pioneer. All the guns would be aimed and squared at me, to make me an example to other parents.

That said, the article is interesting that the people are all teachers. Stephen brings out an interesting point – ” Given that a good deal of the social values, visions and ideals that we have are shaped and communicated through our social institutions, it would be interesting to ponder what might happen if a large percentage of families took up the home-schooling banner and became their own mini school districts.

I tend to think that a significant portion of our social fabric would begin to unravel, and we might end up with a degree of instability.”

Who are ‘we’ that has shaped the social institutions? As a parent, I certainly have found, that our social institutions imposes values upon the students, parents and the communities. It forces one and all to adapt to the shifting values of school. There has been sea-sized changes to school since the 1970s. Part of it can be blame on the rapid changes to values and culture over the decades, but in many ways the social institutions especially the schools over the decades have withdrawn from the public sphere, and are now dictating the values, shaping them and communicating the values in one direction to the public. As of 2012, schools have become isolated and remote from the public.in an attempt as I believe, to have control of the shifting values and culture that is taking place throughout society. In doing so, the public education system sought to take control over the values and culture of schooling, at the expense of the public’s ability to participate on their own terms, and within their knowledge base.

As Tara has stated, ” Boredom, bullying, sex, drugs, idiocy, lousy teachers, hyperactive classroom behaviour, shallow curriculum… I have heard all of these reasons for having a parent stay home and set up a school room. I confess, I’m a teacher and I find myself saying, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep… it’s all true.”

I also say yep, yep, yep and all true. Many reasons why parents homeschooled but as I believe, what lies behind the reasons, are the values and school culture that insists and perhaps demands one and all to adapt, comply, and accept the values and the school culture as their own.

No zeros policies, gradeless report cards parent concern protocols and other policies that seeks to control the behaviour and actions of parents and students, on the pretense of the mission statements, values and culture of schools. As Carmel, has stated – “These are important years when many teachers label kids, and kids start to internalize those labels.

Two–any point in elementary school where a child is miserable and he or she is misunderstood by a teacher or getting an inordinate amount of bullying.

“First, do no harm” should be the principle to follow.”

When parents object to school policies, they too are labelled and often parents internalized the labels like children do, and are reinforced by the processes and protocols that are in place to essentially control the actions and behaviours of the parents. The parents who resist and the rebels are often the ones who have strong individual values that they wear with pride on their sleeve, and yet are the first set of parents to be labelled for daring to questioned the protocols, school policies, and other practices that is within the parameters of the school’s values and culture.

To Stephen’s question, and his answer – ” it would be interesting to ponder what might happen if a large percentage of families took up the home-schooling banner and became their own mini school districts.

I tend to think that a significant portion of our social fabric would begin to unravel, and we might end up with a degree of instability.”

Instability within the public education system, is the likely outcome of a system that no longer responds to the needs of their students, the parents and the communities outside of the public education system.

Curiosity and other things like intense engagement in learning of students are some of the signs, that a school is responding to the needs of the students, the parents and the communities. The lack of it, causes society and the individuals to react and some ultimately home school, rather than trying to adapt to a school, that is doing more harm to the child and his learning.

Another example, is a new kid on the block that will probably be a parent pleaser and certainly some time in the future, will cause upset in some Winnipeg grade 4 and grade 5 math classes, and more bad press on the current math curriculum of the fuzzy math kind. .

“Is this a remedial program or an enrichment program?

The short answer is “both”. We recognize that many children have not mastered essential skills that are appropriate for their grade level, such as multi-digit multiplication and long division, and we intend to teach those skills and help children to master them. We do not offer one-on-one tutoring at this time, though, and if a child has been determined to be well below grade level in math by his or her teacher, a one-on-one tutoring program would be more appropriate. We will also be providing enrichment problems to challenge children and to pique their interest in mathematics. On occasion, we will be arranging for guest speakers to treat the children to inspirational math diversions. ”

And the neat part is a partnership with the parents and university math professors – who I am sure parents will be learning new information and knowledge in math, the importance of algorithms and guidance for parents on the math weaknesses of their children, to promote a love for numbers and a natural curiosity. The same curiosity of numbers that are absent in most schools. And on that note, another reason why parents homeschool, when little Suzie and Bobby can’t do their math homework, because they don’t know their math facts. The responses from the school and school board are priceless, especially when it comes to the edubabble on why children don’t need to have automatic recall in basic math facts.

There was one comment, and one that is no longer taught in our schools.

I have friends, a young artistic couple who move to the Bruce Peninsula to get the cheap land and bucolic setting to be artists and artisans. They decided to home school and met other home schoolers. They found out that the others were all very right wing religious fundies who didn’t trust the big bad secular socialist public school system.

My position has always been, encourage as many as possible to home school. The remainder can run a big bad secular socialist public school system.

If the other kids want to believe humans walked the Earth with Barney the Dinosaur, go for it. They will be kinda embarrassed if they have to integrate to the “real” society some day.

And so Levin pans the book – as Levin has stated – “He wants people to ask different questions about the purpose and nature of schooling. He does this largely by telling the stories of a wide range of historical figures in the development of public education – some well known, others much less so – and by looking at issues that are not typically the focus of public debate on schooling.”

Levin does not want people to become curious about issues that lie beneath the public education structure. A structure that is loathe to let go, to allow public debate on the very issues that Levin states there is no easy answers.

I find Levin and his camp followers very predictable. Zander Sherman came as a shock and a bit of a rude awakening — and they are striking back. This is one book that they cannot afford to ignore because it’s written by someone from the outside, and not aligned with any one educational faction or another.

Advanced kids are sometimes bored in public school. The real ones (99% of gifted do not belong in gifted) should be accelerated or enriched or both but the entire school system cannot be whipsawed by a tiny group of advanced kids.

I also find it more than passing strange that the reform movement of testing, DI, phonics, etc etc wonderes where the curiosity went. You broke it. You own it.

Facinating new report commented on by both J.P. Greene and Education Week.

Charter schools are having very little effect on public school enrolement but they are killing private school enrolement across the USA. Biggest group suffering decline are private Catholic schools but all private schools are losing enrolement to charters. Ironic? You bet.